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I haven’t blogged in a while, but a crazy week has made me want to share a message with you. I have been feeling like I’m in the world alone for the past few days. My friends have been there, my family has been there, I interact with people at work, but I’m yet feeling like I’m in a bubble and not connected to anyone. This is because I have lost the connection that I once had with myself. I am a nurturer by nature. If you are sick, I want to give you medicine. If you are sad, I want to make you laugh. If you are hungry, I want to feed you. However, in the midst of nurturing and loving, I lost ROSHAWNDA. Am I sad? No. But what I am is a stranger to myself. I think the reason is because I spend so much time trying to balance the normal woes of my own life as well as the woes of those around me that I have become a casualty. As women, we want to fix everything. We want to be the best mom, aunt, wife, girlfriend, sister, friend, etc. and we tend to fall short because we have not taken the time to remember that you were you before you were anything else. You came first so you come first. People notice your change when your physical appearance changes. How many times have you heard a person say “ooooh she let herself go?” But me? I look the same, yet I have let myself go. My emotional appearance isn’t the same. Am I depressed? NO But, I am just simply not connected to ROSHAWNDA in the way that I should be. I’m telling you this because I want you to continue to be as awesome as you are, but include yourself on your priority list. Including you and taking care of you will help you to better take care of all the people that need you. You can’t give anyone else 100% until you give yourself 1, 000. This is a daily struggle for me. So I am making a promise to myself to strengthen my emotional appearance so that I can be a better friend, sister, niece, granddaughter, teacher, and more importantly child of GOD. It is so easy to get caught up into everyone else that you forget to care about you. I’m not saying be selfish; just try to remember that you matter too. And nobody else on Earth can cater to your needs the way that you can. I have decided to make a plan to devote time each week to myself in isolation. ISOLATION: meaning unplugged from social media, not texting in group texts, and just alone with me and my thought mediating on what is and not what I want it to be. I will spend this time thinking about how to be a better RO. See, the scary thing is that if I continue to be invisible to myself, I will always be invisible to others. I can’t have that and neither can you. Don’t neglect you. Sometimes the only person hindering you from happiness is you. Claim your happy back. Take back your peace. Rejoice in rejection. Know that you can’t do it all and you were not put here to. Cry if you need to just don’t fall apart. You are not a robot. You get to be not okay. You have the right to want more. You need sleep. You need food. You need peace of mind. You deserve the luxury of pampering yourself mentally and physically. Most importantly, you deserve YOU! It is okay to say no. It is okay to not have time. It is okay to want to be better. Bottom line: if you don’t take the time to know the person you see in the mirror, then you are worthless to others. I challenge you to find a day that is just for you. Give no thought to issues that have nothing to do with you. After all our souls weren’t saved by a woman, they were saved by a baby of the male gender and clearly you and I don’t fit that mold. We can’t save people no matter how hard we want to try. This (whatever it is) is not your fight. Chin up and know that it’s okay and that you are AMAZING.

So, I recently posted my opinion on what I thought cheating did to women. Since then, I have thought more about it, and I came to the conclusion that there was a much more long lasting affect that I did not include in my initial post. I would be doing myself as well as other women an injustice to not address this. I would have to say that the main effect that being cheated on has on a woman is that it NEGATIVELY AFFECTS HER FUTURE RELATIONSHIPS AND EFFORTS AT RELATIONSHIPS. See when a woman is cheated on, she throws all men in the category with man who cheated on her. She is defensive and guarded. She cannot properly give love or receive it because her trust is shot. She does not believe that this time will be any different and that is the way she treats any man that approaches her. When something good comes her way, she questions it or sabotages it because she subconsciously believes that it is indeed too good to be true. For example, if a guy comes in and does all the things that the woman was not getting in the previous relationship, she is prone to think he is fake or just putting on. In a new relationship, a woman who has been hurt is just sitting around waiting on this guy’s true colors to appear.

The issue with this is that not all men are the same, and just because you had a bad experience with a guy, you cannot allow that experience to determine how you view and treat every other man that comes in your life. Not everybody is out to use and abuse you. There are some good men left, but you will never find him if you are still living in the dust of what happened to you.

Now, I am not saying that you should not be careful and pay attention to early signs, but you cannot allow what happened to you to determine what will happen to you. Treating a new man according to how an unfaithful ex treated you is allowing the very person who hurt you to control your life. If he is a factor in your decision making when dating, then he is still winning. HE IS STILL RULING YOUR LIFE EVEN IN HIS ABSENCE. Don’t give him that power. Does he deserve it? Moreover, what you are really doing is running a potentially good guy away. You will never be happy if you just refuse to let go of what happened to you. Again, not all men are the same.

If you find yourself getting the same types of men, then that says something about your taste in men rather than the character of all men.

Ok, so you had a bad relationship. It happens. Bounce back! Get over it. Dust yourself off, and try to love again. You are capable of giving and receiving real love. It can happen. Don’t give up on it or ruin it because you were hurt.

Life is about choices. You are free to make the choices that you want to make in life. You are free to choose left or right. You are free to choose to lie or tell the truth. You are free to date who you please. You are free to inflict pain or pleasure. You are totally free in your decision making. However, decision making is one of the most expensive freedoms that you have. Making decisions is indeed a gamble, because although you are free to make choices, you are not free to choose the consequences associated with those choices. You can choose to be disloyal to a person, but you cannot choose how that person will respond to your disloyalty. You can even choose to have a child, but you cannot choose what that child will look like, act like, or be like. When it comes to consequences you are totally POWERLESS and all your efforts to shape consequences are futile. I said all of that to say this: you have to be careful about the bed that you are making, especially if it is one you are not sure you will be comfortable laying in. You cannot keep making decisions and then running from the consequences of those decisions. Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and say “hey I caused this, so let me deal with it.” Life does not afford you any rewinds or do over’s, so sometimes you have to focus on getting it right the first time. If you attempt to make good heartfelt decisions, then you are less likely to be running, sad, and afraid when it is time to pay the piper.